The Word Palestine Is Not Arabic, Therefore, Arabs' Claim Is Illegitimate
Myth The word Palestine is not Arabic, therefore, Arabs claim to the land is illegitimate Response 1 A common "argument" by Zionists and their sympathizers is that "Palestine" is not an Arabic word and that this somehow "proves" that Palestinians have "no right" to Palestine while the Jews do. What the Zionists ignore, is that by their own logic, the Jews should also have no right to the land because the Jews don't call the land "Palestine" either. In the Jewish Tanakh, the land is called "Peleshet" - not Palestine. It is "Palestine" only in English. In Latin it is "Palaestina." In Arabic, it is called "Filastin." Now that that has been established, lets get to the absurdity of the claim that what someone calls the country is enough to say whether a people have any right to it. Proponents of this line of "logic" (more accurately - a lack thereof) forget that names are different in different languages almost everywhere. America, for instance, according to the standard story, comes from the name of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Does this mean that non-Italian Americans have "no right" to live in America? No. But according to the Zionist "logic" it should. Does this make any sense? No. Would we accept this line of logic for America? No. If we wouldn't accept this reasoning for America, why should we accept it in the case of Palestine? At the end of the day, what matters when deciding who has a right to the land, is who is living there (just like if we were to judge who has a right to live in America, we'd have to say whoever is living here and NOT say "the Italians only have a right because that's where the name origninated") - and there is no doubt that by the time the Zionist colonists started to arrive from Europe, Palestine was inhabited overwhelmingly by Palestinian Arabs. According to ISRAELI demogropher Sergio DellaPergola, in 1890, Palestine had 532,000 inhabitants, of whom, 489,000 were Muslim and Christian Palestinians. Only 43,000 were Jews. http://www.archive-iussp.org/Brazil2001/s60/S64_02_dellapergola.pdf (See chart). A Zionist/Zionist sympathizer/misled reader may object saying that "the Palestinian Arabs were immigrants." I answer: according to genetic studies, the Palestinian Arabs are actually the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. They are descended from the indigenous peoples living there by the time the Hebrews arrived, who later interbred with the Jews, and then the the Arabs. The Palestinians are descended from all the different peoples who had ever been on the land. They truly embody the history of Palestine, and what it means to the Palestinian. Here are links http://www.rense.com/general48/palestinians.pdf http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/01/shared-genetic-heritage-of-jews-and.html http://bric.postech.ac.kr/science/97now/00_10now/001030a.html http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/05/000509003653.htm The Palestinians have thus been living on the land continuously for thousands of years. That is enough to say that they belong on the land - they were living there for thousands of years. On the other hand, most Jews were immigrants from Europe (and later from Arab states). Yes some of them are descendents of Jews who lived there thousands of years ago, but the truth is that they had been abroad for thousands of years. The average Jew born in Russia whose famiy has been in Europe for 2,000 years has lost all real conections to Palestine. They may claim they had "religious" connections to it, or "historical" connections - but all these exist only in their imaginations. It is an abstraction. At the end of the day, Palestine for them is only what they imagine it to be - there is no real solid connection - on the other hand, the Palestinians do have a solid real connection - they were physically on the land. Saying Jews have a "right" to colonize Palestine is like saying that Whites in the US have a "right" to move to Europe because their ancestors came from there. If I get my genetics tested and find out that my ancestors lived in Europe thousands of years ago, does this mean I have some kind of a "right" to move their and displace the indigenous inhabitants? No. So why should we hold Jews by different standards? Yes Jews may emigrate their like everyone else - but that's not what Zionists were doing. Their goal was to take control of it and displace the inhabtants (see Herzl's "The Jewish State"). That's no immigration - that's colonization - colonization founded on imaginary connections. It's unjustified. We have thus established that the Zionists were disconnected from the land, were colonizers, and thus had no "right" to take over it at the expense of the indigenous peoples. On the other hand, the Palestinians were physically on the land for thousands of years and saw the land as their home - that is a real connection, and they thus have a right to live there. Had the Zionists just said they wanted a single state and to live side by side with the Palestinians, this would have been no problem. The Palestinians had accepted that from the beginning, as the PLO's official goal was a secular democratic state for Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and as the Syrian General Congress with Palestinian delegates endorsed it in their resolution. The Jews on the other hand rejected it, and called for segregation with a separate Jewish state (believing that different groups should live separately - very Jim Crow and Aparthied in manner). Here are the links: https://bcc-cuny.digication.com/MWHreader/Resolutions_of_the_General_Syrian_Congress_1919 http://www.pij.org/details.php?id=481 Category:Myths Response 2 .. Category:Myths